Measurement Platforms for Mobile Devices

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Project Overview

Studying mobile networks and applications runs into a practical wall: the device. A phone will not let you sit in the middle of its traffic, its battery behaviour cannot be simulated convincingly, and the person holding it has their own plans. Each of those obstacles produced an instrument.

These are tools rather than findings — the apparatus that the measurement studies in our mobile thread depend on.

MBZ: a middlebox on the handset

Traditional middleboxes see traffic at the far end of the first link, by which point the interesting attribution — which app, which library, which permission — is gone. MBZ takes that vantage point and moves it onto the device: an extensible platform that intercepts and can modify traffic before it leaves the handset, or on arrival before it reaches the operating system.

Conceptually it gives a middlebox’s view with the device’s context attached, which is what makes it possible to ask questions about specific applications rather than about aggregate flows. Back in Control describes the design.

BatteryLab: power measurement on real hardware

Energy claims about mobile software are usually made with models, because measuring real draw needs physical instrumentation attached to a real device. BatteryLab is a collaborative platform that shares that instrumentation: devices wired to power monitors, hosted across sites, available remotely so researchers can measure genuine power consumption on hardware they do not own.

Crowd (Soft) Control

The third obstacle is the human. Opportunistic sensing takes measurements wherever participants happen to be, which leaves coverage to chance. Crowd (Soft) Control asked what becomes possible when participants can be gently steered toward where a measurement is needed, and the later HotMobile paper takes up the question of incentives — what actually motivates people to participate, and why one scheme does not fit every population.

Software

Middle-Box Zero (MBZ) — an extensible platform to intercept and modify traffic on the device, before it leaves or before it reaches the OS. GitHub
BatteryLab — a distributed platform for power monitoring of mobile devices, led by Matteo Varvello. Its project site no longer resolves; see the PAM 2022 paper below.

Papers

Crowd (Soft) Control — HotMobile 2012
No One-Size Fits All: Towards a Principled Approach for Incentives in Mobile Crowdsourcing — HotMobile 2014
Back in Control: An Extensible Middle-Box on Your Phone — arXiv, 2020
BatteryLab: A Collaborative Platform for Power Monitoring — PAM 2022

Coverage

Crowd Soft Control was covered by Communications of the ACM, Wired, and Discovery News in 2012.

People

Lead & PI

Fabián E. Bustamante (Northwestern University)

Students

John P. Rula
James Newman

Collaborators

Matteo Varvello (Nokia Bell Labs)
Kleomenis Katevas, Mihai Plesa, Hamed Haddadi (Brave Software / Imperial College London)
Narseo Vallina-Rodriguez (IMDEA Networks)
Abbas Razaghpanah (Stony Brook University)
Mark Allman (ICSI)

Measurement Platforms | Aqualab - Northwestern University